


the whole world, it is sleeping

by carrotstix



Series: starlight. [8]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Babies, Gen, Kid Fic, Lena Luthor & Winn Schott Jr. Friendship, Surprise! You Are The Father!, Wine Mom Lena Luthor, starlight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 08:09:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13543269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carrotstix/pseuds/carrotstix
Summary: Winn shows up at Kara and Lena’s door with panic in his eyes and a baby neither of them has ever seen before.Oh, and the baby? It’s his.





	the whole world, it is sleeping

**Author's Note:**

> okay y’all i don’t have anything snarky or silly to put here, i just want you all to know that if you’ve read the starlight series, whether you’ve been following since chapter one of Made of Starlight, or just caught on like, this week, i love and adore you, thank you so much i love you all!!!!  
> this follows the bonus scene in the epilogue, directly after where it cuts off  
> [title taken from ‘bloom’ by the paper kites as all series titles are taken from songs in the starlight series playlist]

Winn shows up at their door holding a baby carrier with a strange infant, and several things run through Kara’s head at once. _What the hell is happening? When did Winn have a child? Did he not know, why didn’t he tell us? What is going on?_

When it comes to saying something out loud, though, she stumbles. “Um- I- inside,” she stammers, opening the door wider and ushering him in. After a second, he shambles through the doorway, holding fast to the carrier. Lena looks up when she sees him, and the warm smile that crosses her face fades into confusion when she takes stock of the cargo he’s carting. Wordlessly, she stands and crosses the room to meet them as Winn, after a brief moment of hesitation, places the car seat on the island counter. He reaches inside, before withdrawing his hands wearing a sort of ashamed expression.

“I, um, I don’t know how to get him out,” he admits.

“Do you want me to?” Lena asks, and Winn nods, swallows. Reaching past them, Lena starts to unbuckle the infant from his seat, and coos when she pulls him free. “What’s his name?”

“Um, Huxley, Huxley Cosmo,” Winn replies, still looking incredibly overwhelmed. Lena hums, bouncing Huxley in her arms a few times before turning to Kara.

“Darling, can you take him, and I’ll talk to Winn?”

“Sure,” Kara agrees, reaching over to lift Huxley into her arms. “Hey there, little dude.”

Kara starts to walk back and forth in the aisle between the kitchen counter and the island, murmuring to the baby, so Lena places a hand on Winn’s elbow and leads him into the living room.

“His name is Huxley,” is all Winn says as he sinks down to the couch, a sort of blank, shocked stare pointed at the ground. “And his middle name is Cosmo, like- like space cosmos.”

“Winn, you’ve said that before,” she reminds him, and he looks up at her with something like straight panic in his eyes.

“That’s- that’s the only thing I know about him,” he says. “But Lyra, she- she just showed up and there he is, she just shows up with my kid after disappearing for ten months, and what am I supposed to do, turn her away? He’s got her eyes and my ears and so I let her in, of course I do! And we talk and talk and she tells me that she’s so sorry, she panicked, but she’s here now, with _him_ , and he’s mine!”

“Where’s Lyra now?” Lena asks.

“She just- she _left!_ ” Winn bursts, loud enough that Lori glances at him from where she’s sat on the floor and playing with her blocks. “I went to the bathroom, and when I came back out, she- she was just _bloody_ gone, and Huxley was in his carrier on the ground with the- the base thing for the car, and his birth certificate was on the table with his diaper bag but she was just gone! I can’t- Lena what am I going to do?”

“Well, there’s a lot of options,” she replies. “But what do you want to do?’

“I have no idea,” he answers, scrubbing his hands across him face. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant when she disappeared, and everything between us was always- it was casual. She was adamant that she didn’t want any commitment, didn’t want a relationship, any of that, so when she left, I just figured it was over, you know? And suddenly, I’ve got a child. A baby, Lena, a _baby_!”

Lori looks up, scoots across the floor over to them. “Bab?” She gurgles, and Lena reaches down to stroke the top of her daughter’s head with a fond smile. Lori uses the couch to pull herself up, and she smacks Winn’s knee with a pudgy hand several times to get his attention, mumbling a string on something unintelligible. He offers her a weak smile, and she takes that as attention enough, giving him a grin that’s roughly 15% teeth and 85% gums before crawling back to the piles of blocks she’s been stacking and knocking down for several minutes. 

Winn huffs a small laugh, but the scared look on his face never really goes away. “I have no idea how to be a parent,” he whispers, still watching Lori scramble across the floor. “I mean, I love you and Kara, and I love Lori, but I have no idea how you do it. I mean, you’re responsible for a whole other human life, doesn’t that terrify you?”

“Sometimes,” Lena replies. “There are days when I wake up and it just hits me that I am the entire world of this tiny other person. That I’m in charge of taking care of them, making sure they’re safe and fed and happy. But you know what?”

He looks up, makes solid, tangible eye contact with her for the first time in minutes. “What?”

She gives him a wide grin in response, reaching out to place a hand on his knee. “It’s worth it,” she tells him. “Every morning, I wake up to my beautiful, amazing family, and I wonder how I got so lucky. For years, I thought I would never be able to love somebody else as much as I love Kara, to care that much about someone else, but the second they put Lori in my arms, it changed everything. Yes, having a kid is hard work, and _yes_ , there are days when I feel burned out and exhausted and I wonder if I’m doing everything wrong, but I look at Lori and I know that, no matter what, she is worth it.”

“I-“ he says, but he cuts himself off, dropping his face into his hands. For a few, long seconds, they sit in silence, before he finally looks back up at her with slowly watering eyes. “I- Lena, I’m scared.”

“It’s okay to be scared,” she assures him. “If you’re scared, it means you care. Means you have something to lose.”

He slumps back against the couch. “So what do I do now?”

“Well, for starters, you and Huxley are spending the night here,” she replies. “We still have Lori’s bassinet, so we can put him in that tonight, and then we’ll figure out where to go from there. Okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees, running a hand through his hair. Lena smiles once more, pats him on the shoulder before moving to stand, but he reaches out to grab her hand.

“Lena?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

She smiles at, squeezes his hand. “Anytime.”

-

(That night, once Lori and Huxley are both asleep, Lena pushes a glass of white wine into Winn’s hand, pours a second one for Kara and some red for herself. When she pads over to the couch, Winn is curled up on the corner of the couch, and both him and Kara are uncharacteristically silent, neither really having words to say.

Lena’s eyes catch on the birth certificate, peeking out of a purple folder on the table, and she sets her wine down to pick up the file instead. The birth certificate slides out into her hand, and Lena pauses when she sees the name.

“Winn?” She asks, voice quiet. “Have you looked at this yet?”

“No,” he replies, sounding hoarse. “I just- I brought it because I don’t really know like, what I’m supposed to do with it.”

“Well, you use it for several things,” Lena tells him, holding it out to him. “But I really think you should take a look?”

“Why?” He asks, reaching out to grab it. “Is there something wrong with it?”

“The name, Winn.”

He looks down, and on the printed line, it doesn’t say _Strayd_ after _Huxley Cosmo_. Instead, in a curly sort of scrawl he recognizes, is _Schott_.

“Oh,” he breathes. “That’s my name. That’s- that’s _my_ last name.”)

-

The next morning, Huxley wakes them all up with his crying, setting off Lori in the process and causing them all to jump into motion.

Kara and Lena, both running mostly on trained instinct by now, having been parents for the past eight months, grab and change both children, prep two bottles, and are feeding Huxley and Lori within half an hour. Winn, wide-eyed and a little overwhelmed at being woken up by two tiny, wailing people, hangs back and watches them do it all with an awed sort of expression.

Lena offers to let him feed Huxley, but he puts both his hands up in front of him, looking almost defensive, and declines. She knows he can do it, has seen him do it before with her daughter, but there’s still that paling look of terror in his eyes, so she doesn’t push it.

(Plus, it is a little nice to hold a baby this small again. Lori only has six or so months on him, but actually having Huxley in her arms makes him seem so much younger, so much more little.)

It’s a Saturday, thankfully, so there’s nothing pressing they have to do when it comes to work. Kara gets the weekends off, and Lena pushes anything LuthorCorp related off until Monday, after a somewhat tense conversation with her mother about it, which ends in an agreement to hold off business until then, and a promise to try and pull some strings to work out another visit with Lex again by the end of the year.

Instead, they put an episode of some random sitcom on the television, let Lori loose on the floor, and set Huxley up on a playmat. Lori crawls over to take a peek at him a couple times, mostly confused by this new, squirming presence in her home, but she soon finds herself more interested with trying to use various pieces of furniture to pull herself up with, in an attempt to walk.

“What are you going to do?” Kara asks. Lena can tell, of course, that her wife is trying to be gentle about it, but Winn still gets that nervous look on his face again.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “I mean, he’s mine, right? What kind of parent would I be if I gave him up, just like that? But I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Well, you’ve got us,” Kara assures him. “We’re not quite as new to the whole parenting thing. After all, we’ve got Lori to show for it. She may be a little weird, granted, but she’s healthy, and I’d like to think she’s happy.”

“Yeah,” Winn hums, and goes quiet. Instead, the three of them turn their attention to the television, pretending to watch despite the fact that they’re all mostly caught up in their thoughts.

They go through several episodes of the show playing, the kids entertaining themselves and each other, at times. Lori finds it a fun game to wander over every fifteen minutes or so to nudge at Huxley, inspect him as if trying to make sure he’s still there, before going back to her toys, or skimming through a picture book as if she can actually read it.

At one point, Huxley starts to fuss from his spot on the floor, and Kara pushes herself up off the couch to swoop him up. After a quick inspection, she finds his diaper full, so she carries him off into Lori’s room to use the changing table. 

They’re only gone for a couple minutes, but Lena and Winn say nothing in that time, trading weighted stares and watching Lori try and sort shapes, which mostly consists of her trying to shove a square into a circular hole. When Kara reemerges, she moves to put Huxley back down, but Lena interrupts her.

“Give him to Winn,” she says.

Winn balks. “I- I haven’t, I-” he stammers, but Kara shushes him.

“He’s your son,” she replies, and he goes silent, allows Lena to adjust his elbows. Offering a reassuring smile, Kara leans down and places Huxley in his arms, helping Winn to use one hand to cradle the infant’s head and the other to support his back.

Completely unperturbed, Huxley shifts, settles down with a little huffing noise and curls himself against his father’s chest without protest. Winn blinks, staring down at this tiny human in his arms that has the same big ears and curved lips as he does, a long moment of silence passing over the room.

“Oh my god,” he breathes, and when he looks up at Lena and Kara, he has tears in his eyes. He opens his mouth a few times, but no words come out.

“...Winn?” Kara asks, hesitating, and he smiles.

“I have a son,” he whispers. “I have a son. I’m a dad.”

“You’re keeping him?” The blonde questions.

“Yeah,” he answers. “I’m… I’m so keeping him. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to let him go.”

Lena smiles, and Winn returns it, a full force grin despite the fact that he’s begun to cry openly.

“Hi Huxley,” he murmurs, using his hand to smooth down the brownish-blonde patch of hair on the baby. “I’m your dad.”

(In that moment, when his son opens his bright pale eyes, smacks his lips together with a yawn, Winn makes a promise to be the best father he can be.)

**Author's Note:**

> i just wanna say: Y’ALL, i’ve started work on the second generation, and i’ve got about ~6500 words written already, spanning all of lori’s seven years, and i have sO MANY FEELINGS!!!! I’m dESPERATE to share all of them, so if you head over to my tumblr [ i-am-not-carrot.tumblr.com ] and drop me an ask with a word in it, i’ll post a line from lori’s story that has ur word in it, because i’m so excited and i want to share!!!!! or you can just ask a question about lori n her friends [i’ve already fleshed out their personalities and houses and cast actors who look like them] and i will be SO happy to answer them all, i’m so excited about my babies!!!!!  
> [ also, did i purposely tease another one-shot when i said ‘another visit with Lex _again_? yes, i did ;) ]


End file.
